When Sondheim wrote "Sweeney Todd," he discovered that there was no moment of (pardon the pun) epiphany where the audience realizes the truth about what happened to the Beggar Woman. Some would notice it early, others only when Mrs. Lovett confesses her lie. So he added a new scene for the first post-Broadway…

You heard it here first, folks: Vergier Tighe killed and ate her own children.

I wonder if that's part of it. I've known one or two asshole types who send unsolicited dick picks, but immediately get suspicious and cagey if a woman asks for one. "Why would she WANT to see that?"

Yeah. I'm perfectly willing to accept "rape is not a laughing matter." It's a little harder when you consider the corollary; "rape is literally the only thing that is not a laughing matter."

On the contrary I think it's extraordinarily well thought out- I can't think of any other work that so effortlessly says "fuck literally everything that came before me; I am culture now and nothing but me will matter to you."

My former college professor is interested in linguistic progression and shades of meaning; he's suggested that "based off" has become a more tangential variant of "based on." If "based on" implies direct inspiration to adaptation, "based off" implies use of the original concept as a jumping off point to something more…

Bret Michaels's Poison

"Bare fists. No teeth. And the fight isn't over until you bring me a piece of the other guy's skull."

It's interesting that the stories about his alleged sex life are as lurid as they are, given that the works of Sondheim seem tangentially asexual in the same way that the early Pokemon video games seem tangentially autistic.

Sondheim is somewhat notorious for not addressing his sexuality, or sexuality much at all, in the vast body of his work. Love and especially physical sex are often looked at askance, abstracted or grotesqued into something alien.

Fripp's work with Brian Eno comes pretty close to punk at times; certainly closer then his concurrent work with Bowie.

Isn't this paraphrased from the famous criticism of Queen's sometimes questionable lyrical content?

He's in "The Loved One" as well, with a truly twisted cameo as an almost necrophiliac mortuary worker.

It became plot important- a demon tried to use the priest's sexuality as a weakness against him, but he was confident enough in himself that he didn't have any weak points for the demon to pry him open (pun intended).

Since it's hard to talk about LGBT youth on television without mentioning Ryan Murphy, the character of Blaine on Glee was a rather obvious hipster Marty Stu, but it was at least an interesting subversion: the fey boy whose sexuality defines and dominates his entire character, dating the openly gay masculine…

"Nice is different than good," as Sondheim says in "Into the Woods."

Isn't that part of the point though? The fact that the film's iconic promotional image is a dark-skinned black man with bulging, terrified eyes, reminiscent on some level of offensive old Golliwog tropes and "coon films?"

You just described a standard $200k suburban home in my state. If that's all the stuff a McMansion has in it, and they don't have anything more baroque, what's the point?

I should be repulsed by them, but I'm not. And I'm not a stupid person- I've just been raised on and eventually created enough media with the "too large, somewhat garish and unpleasant house full of jumbles, where terrible dreamlike things happen" trope that I feel at home in these surroundings.

Did you see the bizarre Gong Show remake premiere last week? Ken Jeong's palpable glee at waiting until the last possible moment to gong an offensive Asian act, then gonging them a second before their victory, was a highlight.